Four out of five executives say that when companies can't effectively measure their sustainability efforts, they overstate their progress (Google Cloud, 2023). Ninety-six percent of finance leaders report problems with the nonfinancial data they receive (EY, 2024). The people writing the sustainability narrative and the people responsible for the data underneath it are operating in different realities. That gap is where reputations collapse.

The Story Without a Foundation

Most sustainability communications teams are working from a deficit they didn't create and can't easily fix. They're asked to craft credible narratives about environmental and social performance using data they don't control, can't verify, and often receive too late to influence.

The scale of the problem is hard to overstate. Deloitte's 2024 Sustainability Action Report found that 57% of senior leaders cite data quality as their top sustainability challenge, and 88% rank it among their top three (Deloitte, 2024). Only 15% of companies currently disclose Scope 3 emissions despite every major reporting framework requiring it. PwC's 2025 Global Sustainability Reporting Survey found that 90% of wave 2 organisations still rely on spreadsheet-based sustainability data collection (PwC, 2025). Only one-fifth of companies due to report in their 2025 financial year have validated the availability and completeness of their data (PwC, 2024). The communications team is building the house on top. The foundation hasn't been poured.

This produces a specific failure pattern. A sustainability report makes a claim about emissions reduction. The data behind it sits in a spreadsheet maintained by a team in another department. Nobody has validated the methodology. Nobody has confirmed the baseline. The communications team publishes the number because it was provided, and because the alternative is publishing nothing. Then an investor, a regulator, or a journalist asks a follow-up question. And nobody can answer it.

Where the Gap Becomes Dangerous

The consequences of this disconnect have moved from reputational to financial to legal. Each of these dimensions is now being enforced with institutional force.

The financial cost is measurable. BCG analysed approximately 47,000 sustainability-related announcements from the world's 1,000 largest public companies between 2015 and 2022. Only 20% of companies saw a positive market reaction to 75% or more of their sustainability announcements. Nearly a third saw half or more of their announcements destroy value. Companies that made frequent announcements without substantive business case elements were actively punished by the market (BCG, 2023). Sustainability communications that outrun their evidence actively erode value.

The regulatory cost is escalating. ESMA's 2024 Final Report on Greenwashing established that sustainability claims must be “substantiated with clear and credible reasoning, facts and processes,” with limitations on data and metrics made explicit. ESMA identified a common vulnerability across the market: reliance on third-party sustainability data providers without adequate verification, and the absence of regular audits of internal sustainability policies (ESMA, 2024). The European regulator is now defining greenwashing in terms that apply directly to what communications teams produce. A sustainability report that makes claims the organisation's data infrastructure can't support is, by this definition, a compliance liability.

The legal cost is growing fastest. Over 2,500 active climate litigation lawsuits exist globally (Fitzgerald O'Shea, 2025). New York sued JBS, alleging the company “profited from fraudulent and illegal business activities” through “unsubstantiated and misleading environmental marketing claims.” The allegation centred on JBS's net-zero-by-2040 pledge, which lacked a viable implementation plan backed by adequate data. The suit didn't challenge the company's intentions. It challenged the evidence behind its communications.

For the communications professional, this is the critical shift. Sustainability messaging used to be evaluated on tone and positioning. It's now being evaluated on data integrity. The question has moved from “is this compelling?” to “can you prove this?”

Why Communications Teams Can't Fix This Alone

The instinct is to look at this problem and conclude that communications teams need to be more careful with their language. Hedge more. Claim less. The instinct is understandable, and it's wrong. The problem is structural, and it sits upstream of the communications function.

KPMG's 2024 Sustainability Organisation Survey identified the three primary obstacles to integrating sustainability into business operations: insufficient resources or capacity to collaborate effectively (44%), internal silos and limited communication between departments (41%), and divergent priorities across functions (KPMG, 2024). Nearly half of organisations still manage sustainability data manually with spreadsheets. Communications teams aren't failing because they're careless. They're failing because they sit at the end of a broken pipeline.

The Conference Board's 2024 research quantified the consequence. Only 30% of executives say their company effectively communicates the results and ROI of its sustainability initiatives. Forty-one percent report that their sustainability ROI measurement is “either underperforming or uncertain,” compared to 17% for traditional financial ROI measurement (Conference Board, 2024). The gap between how well companies measure financial performance and how well they measure sustainability performance is more than two to one. Communications teams are being asked to narrate a story the organisation hasn't yet figured out how to measure.

CDP's data exposes how deep this runs. Of approximately 6,000 companies that disclosed having a 1.5°C-aligned climate transition plan in 2023, only 1% (140 companies) disclosed sufficiently against all 21 of CDP's key credibility indicators (CDP, 2024). Companies are making commitments at a level of specificity their data systems can't substantiate. The communications function then inherits these commitments and is expected to present them credibly. It's an impossible brief.

Google Cloud's 2023 survey of 1,476 C-suite executives crystallised the dynamic: nine in ten companies are speaking publicly about their sustainability commitments. Only 58% are implementing programmes behind those commitments. And only 22% are measuring them against targets (Google Cloud, 2023). The distance between what companies say and what they can prove is enormous. Communications teams don't create this distance. They inherit it. And they're increasingly held accountable for it.

What a Data Spine Actually Requires

The companies navigating this environment well have made a specific organisational choice. They've decided that sustainability data quality is a precondition for sustainability communications, not a parallel workstream that occasionally intersects.

This means investing in data governance before narrative quality. EY found that 96% of finance leaders reported problems with the nonfinancial data they receive. The top issues: varying data formats, data inconsistencies, incomplete data, and unclear definitions (EY, 2024). Fifty-five percent fear that inadequate data and due diligence could lead to accusations of misleading sustainability claims. When finance leaders don't trust the sustainability data, the communications team has no credible raw material to work with. Fixing the data pipeline is a communications investment, even though it doesn't feel like one.

It means connecting communications to material factors. PwC found that 94% of investors believe corporate sustainability reporting contains unsupported claims (PwC, 2023). The effective response is fewer, better-substantiated claims anchored to the sustainability factors that investors and rating agencies actually weight in your sector. A company with strong, verifiable data on three material factors and weak data on seven others has a choice: tell a broad story or a narrow, defensible one. BCG found that “articulation of value creation potential” delivered twice the positive market impact of any other element in sustainability communications. Specificity on material factors outperforms breadth across immaterial ones (BCG, 2023).

It means bringing communications into the data process, not just the output. The Conference Board found that 52% of executives are reworking their sustainability messaging in the current environment (Conference Board, 2025). That reworking fails if it's purely a messaging exercise. Communications professionals need to participate in data validation, understand the methodologies behind the numbers they're presenting, and have the authority to push back when claims can't be substantiated. Seventy percent of companies still rely exclusively on annual sustainability reports for sustainability communication (Grob & Lee, 2025). The companies that do this well have moved to continuous, multi-channel approaches where communications teams engage with the data throughout the year, not just at reporting time.

And it means treating consistency as a technical discipline. RepRisk screens over 150,000 public sources daily, processing roughly 2.5 million documents into risk signals for 300,000 companies (RepRisk, 2025). If your sustainability report tells one story and your CEO’s earnings call tells another, algorithms flag the discrepancy. Tens of thousands of news sources are being screened daily for exactly these inconsistencies, and the gap between your internal narrative and your external sentiment is now measurable in real time. Consistency across channels requires a single data source of truth that all communications draw from. When the sustainability report, the investor presentation, the website, and the press statements each pull from different spreadsheets maintained by different teams, inconsistency is inevitable. That inconsistency is now detectable at machine scale.

The Question Your Communications Team Should Be Asking

PwC put it plainly: “Isolated sustainability reporting teams armed only with spreadsheets will struggle” (PwC, 2025). The credibility of every sustainability claim your company makes rests on the quality of the data underneath it. Communications teams that don't control the data, can't verify the data, and receive the data too late to question it are one difficult question away from a problem that no amount of careful language can fix.

The question for your next leadership meeting isn't whether your sustainability story is well-crafted. It’s whether your communications team has access to verified, audit-ready data on the sustainability factors that matter to your sector, and whether your communications are being evaluated through the same filters that investors and rating agencies use before you publish them. If the answer is no, your communications strategy is a liability waiting for a trigger.

References

• BCG (2023). “Investors Want to Know Your Sustainability Business Case.”
• CDP (2024). “The State of Play: 2023 Climate Transition Plan Disclosure.”
• Conference Board (2024). “Amid Heightened ESG Scrutiny, Showing Sustainability ROI is Critical.”
• Conference Board (2025). “Survey: 80% of Corporations Are Reworking ESG Strategies Amid Policy Shifts.”
• Deloitte (2024). “2024 Sustainability Action Report.”
• ESMA (2024). “Final Report on Greenwashing.”
• EY (2024). “Global Corporate Reporting Survey.”
• Fitzgerald O'Shea, S. (2025). “A Bad Communication Strategy Around Sustainability Can Leave You Legally Exposed.” Harvard Business Review.
• Google Cloud / Harris Poll (2023). “2023 Google Cloud Sustainability Survey.”
• Grob, K. & Lee, V. (2025). “It's Time to Update How Your Company Talks About Sustainability.” Harvard Business Review.
• KPMG (2024). “Addressing the Strategy Execution Gap in Sustainability Reporting.”
• PwC (2023). “Global Investor Survey 2023.”
• PwC (2024). “Global CSRD Survey.”
• PwC (2025). “Global Sustainability Reporting Survey.”
• RepRisk (2025). “RepRisk Approach & Methodology.”